Guided Access Bug in iOS 12

We have received reports of a guided access bug in iOS 12 that is affecting customers who use FlowVella and Flow Kiosk as a kiosk app. We already wrote a post about this guided access bug on Flow Kiosk, but we are now receiving questions from our FlowVella users as well, so want to provide the widest information net on this issue.

There is a know issue with Guided Access in iOS 12, there are reports of it on Reddit and on Apple’s discussion boards. Apple now knows of the issue and is investigating it. We submitted our own bug which was a duplicate of others (and is a good thing as more duplicates increases priority). According to our contacts, this issue has been raised to a Priority 1 and will be investigated immediately, but don’t have a timeline for a fix.

Guided Access Bug Causes Screen to Go Black After 20 Minutes

The bug causes an iPad in iOS 12 to go ‘black’ after 20 minutes when Guided Access is activated, even if the auto lock is set to ‘never’.

We made a temporary fix in Flow Kiosk that solves the issue. Please download the latest version here. Our fix ‘tricks’ the iPad that it is not inactive. As mentioned in our other post, we may develop a more permanent fix, but wanted to get a fix out as soon as we heard of the issue.

We will continue to update this post as we hear more information from our users and Apple.

Thanks again to Betty at Stanford University who first reported this issue to us a couple weeks ago. Getting feedback like this helps us make our product better and learning about this guided access bug in iOS 12 early has enabled us to develop a fix quickly and hopefully before many others are/were affected.